Boiling Point: Road to Hell

The Good
Night descended upon the quiet city. Only in the bar an elderly bearded military leader was still enjoying the striptease. I went to the toilet and got the respawning doughnut from the corpse. There was still some time to kill. I checked my new car - it looked pretty beaten, but with 58 health I figured I could still make it to Pueblo Faro. I just hoped the mafia wouldn't bother me - my work for the government has really driven them crazy. Oh, well. You can't please everyone.

I actually felt pretty comfortable with whatever money I could save and a sniper rifle in the trunk of my car. I stood on the river bank for a while. The breeze was refreshing, though the lighthouse made me feel sad for some reason. I decided to take a stroll. I suppressed the urge to kill the mayor when I was passing his office - the bastard didn't do anything to help me find my daughter. I slowly swam towards the lighthouse. A large colorful bird was flying above my head. It was already morning.

"Time to take a nap", I thought. I ran back to my car. A bandit tried to ambush me. I whipped my machine gun, shot him in the head and took some much-needed painkillers off his body. I hope I won't get addicted to this stuff. I returned to the car, climbed in, drove to the central square, turned off the ignition, and dozed off... when I woke up, it was already noon. Hot sun, blue skies, people selling fruits and cigarettes outside... Without hesitating, I drove out of the city, through the jungle in the direction of Pueblo Faro. It was going to be a long trip. Life was good.

Boiling Point... a game that really requires you to get to know it; but once you do, it welcomes you into its fantastic world. It is about adapting yourself to the game, gradually uncovering and understanding what makes it tick, becoming immersed because the game has its own set of rules and you are intrigued to find out how you will fit. That's the kind of gaming I have been longing for.

Its RPG elements might look shallow on paper (you become tougher and more proficient with weapons the more you fight), but actually this game feels like a real RPG - a game in which freedom and decisions are cardinal aspects. It is technically a first-person shooter, but it is also an open-world game with a lot of choice. I think this is more or less what S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wanted to be before things got cut out of it. I love S.T.A.L.K.E.R for its atmosphere and challenge, but Boiling Point has atmosphere, challenge, plus all those great features that make it more than just a FPS in a sandbox.

Driving adds a lot to the gameplay. This game is certainly not "GTA in jungle": driving is by far less prominent here. Still, nothing compares to traversing miles upon miles of terrain in a vehicle. Boiling Point has a huge world, and it can be explored to the full - on foot, swimming, with a car, helicopter, or boat. There are just so many things to explore here that it almost gets overwhelming. I love open-ended games, and this one is like a gift from heaven in this aspect.

Plenty of little details add to the game's greatness. There is character management - sleeping, addiction to drugs, equipment. Detailed car management - changing tires, repairing, storing items in the trunk. A large variety of weapons and inventory items. Challenging and ultimately very rewarding money management - one of your primary goals in the game will be earning money; how exactly you do that is entirely up to you. The knowledge that in every corner of this world there might be something of interest makes the game incredibly addictive. In a weird way it almost reminded me of System Shock 2; the two games are not at all similar in concept, but they both mesmerized me with their personality, attention to detail and atmosphere.

I call this game a RPG because it conveys the feeling of growth and accomplishment, which is probably reason number one why I play video games generally. You start as a lonely foreigner in a country you know nothing about. You barely have any money, no friends, and no car. Gradually, you get acquainted with Realia's important people and try to win the trust of those you think might help you find your daughter. The storyline itself is nothing special (though the game could have gotten away even with a much worse one), but the portrayal of local life is so detailed and impressive that you wouldn't mind. The dialogues can get weird, but some of them are surprisingly witty. I blame the weirdness on the translators: I played the original Russian version of the sequel and the conversations were clearly better-written there.

Freedom of choice in this game is almost unparalleled. The mission structure is handled much better than in GTA games. I always disliked this "all or almost all missions are mandatory" approach of GTA. I remember how San Andreas dragged because you had to complete all those missions, otherwise you couldn't return to Los Santos and get straight to business. In Boiling Point, theoretically, you could just rush through the several story missions and complete the game. The problem is that people in Realia will help you either for money or because they trust you (which actually makes a lot of sense). To win the trust of a faction, you'll have to perform missions for it.

The beauty of this game is that it always gives you several options. You are never forced to work for a particular faction; you can always opt for paying large amounts of money to more neutrally minded characters and still get the job done. This is something I really want to see in more games: solve problems in different ways. I actually spent a lot of time thinking and planning in this game. Should I help the guerrillas? They seem straightforward, but will they pay well? Won't I spoil my relationship with the CIA if I work for them?.. Everything in the game is delicately balanced, and every choice has a consequence. Mind you, there is no deep ethical role-playing here: it's basically about which guys you kill, and on behalf of whom. But this still allows you to act on your own - and the greatest part is that pretty much the whole game is built like that. You are not prompted to make moral decisions; you are free to shape your entire behavior, with anyone you encounter.

The Bad
Patch the game to 2.0 before playing. The idiotically swirling camera that kicks in whenever you enter a car can drive you crazy. The patch fixes that and a lot of other minor problems. Still, it doesn't really cure the game of its general weirdness. Clearly, Boiling Point was made by passionate people who love gaming, but who got a little bit carried away in paying all their attention to game content. Basically, they didn't polish the game enough: they presented an awesome concept, but the actual experience might be just too rough for some people, especially the impatient modern-day players.

Weird occurrences are everywhere - cars that honk without stopping, people getting aggressive without a reason, people refusing to enter your car when they are supposed to; disappearing voices, odd and funny glitches like a completely demolished road barrier that cars still miraculously bump into, thunder without rain, and so on, and so on. The game is buggy; while some of these bugs are actually fun to exploit (a not-so-obvious infinite treasure glitch... bring it on!), I can understand how they would irritate people who are sensitive to such things.

If you rely too much on the hand-holding game design philosophy that has been dominating the industry for a long while, you might not have that much fun with Boiling Point. It is a game that throws you into its huge, complex world, and tells you that you are on your own. Thankfully, the main quest is always clearly outlined (I recall with horror Gothic 3), but how you survive or get wealthier and more powerful is entirely up to you. Personally, I love this kind of attitude, but I imagine not everyone would agree. The game is also quite hard, and moments of frustration (oh no! That guy sniped me when I was staggering with 1 hit point left and forgot to save!!..) are not uncommon.

The Bottom Line
Boiling Point is like a very talented musician who fails a competition because he played wrong notes. Yes, it is buggy, strange, and uncomfortable, but it's clearly a game made by people who understand what gaming is all about. It's about freedom, exploration, decisions, and losing yourself in a virtual world. For me all its flaws were just part of the game's charm. Boiling Point is a generous game, and a great reward for anyone patient enough to deal with its quirks.

The Good
Boiling Point features a huge, free world to explore at your own leisure, one which is very detailed, extremely stylized (South America!) and often quite dangerous. The weapons in the game are all upgradable, and there are a lot of them to choose from. The vehicles are fun to play around with and it's great that you're allowed to drive, fly and even learn to control a boat. The best part of the game is the dialogue and characters though. Some of the conversations are simply hilarious and most of them feature really good spoken dialogue. Boiling Point is one of the best sandbox games I've played in a long while, comparable to an odd mix of Deus Ex and Morrowind.

The Bad
When released, the game was so buggy it was nearly unplayable. The game stuttered horribly in towns, it corrupted save files with a scary frequency, the game kept crashing in the most inopportune moments and the physics were laughable. They fixed all that with the second patch though (200 MB!), and after the patch the game is absolutely great, apart from some of the quest givers feeling unfinished (Boatswain) and some minor script bugs (stuff not appearing correctly when it's supposed to etc).

The Bottom Line
A game that features a 25x25 kilometer large, freely explorable map, tons of weapons and vehicles, a great story with lots and lots and lots of side quests, an extensive character sheet and inventory, plenty of skills and perks and a beautiful South American setting just can't go wrong! You shoot your way through a very violent but warmly depicted fictional South American country, plagued by drug lords, the mafia, guerrillas and a corrupted government, as you work your way through Indian legends and a cast of memorable characters on your way to rescue your daughter. As a bonus, it's nice to be able to play as a 45+ year old hero with a personality and a believable history for once!

The Good
The basic premise of Boiling Point doesn't sound too bad. A game, not unlike the later GTAs, set in the jungles of some hypothetical South American country (closely resembling Colombia), shifted a tad more into the FPS direction. There are multiple fractions, any number of which the player can choose to support, if he can manage without getting on the bad side of any of them. A huge map, filled with two cities, along with a large number of encampments belonging to the various fractions, such as military bases, guerrilla camps, drug plantations, indian villages ... and a helluva lot of jungle. An arsenal of weapons to pick from, ranging from Pistols and SMGs over Assault and Sniper Rifles all the way to Grenade Launchers, RPGs and even SAMs. Numerous vehicles to traverse the map with, from rusty old cars, jeeps and trucks, oldtimers and even vintage sportscars to helicopters and airplanes to motorboats and navy patrol boats to tanks and self propelled SAM launchers.

The graphics, while nothing you'll get excited about if you have seen the likes of Far Cry, are rather nice, especially the cities and buildings look better than those in GTA, and you can even enter most. The struggle to earn money from more than one fraction adds a nice strategical touch, as does the possibility to pursue the main storyline when as often as you like. While the missions from the various fractions are essentially only a source of income, some of them are interesting interludes in their own right. Actually, I'd say the amount of freedom the player has, to do what he wants for whom at which time (even if a mission says "tonight" or something, you can actually do it any night you like), is probably the best thing that can be said about Boiling Point.

The Bad
Unfortunately, the implementation of this premise Boiling Point represents comes with some (pardon the pun) Deep Shadows. First of all, the world might be big, but it's lifeless and uninspired. The graphics, which look OK on first sight, get very repetitive rather quickly. For example, the same model has been used for all the half dozen big bridges in the game area, oftentimes all the interior rooms in a military base will look identical, up to the posters on the walls(presumably photographies of the developers girlfriends), every single gas station on the map looks like every single other one etc. Especially when compared to the recent GTA:San Andreas, which also has a big map, the repetitiveness becomes apparent.

Apart from the aforementioned bases and named locations, next to nothing can be discovered during jungle trips. This is even more serious since the game involves a LOT of travelling around in slow vehicles along curvy roads where each gas station and roadblock looks identical to the one before. A lot of the missions will have you travel fifteen minutes to a location, do a task, and then travel fifteen minutes back to earn your reward. This is eased a bit due to the fact that you can work for more than one employer at a time, sometimes combining several mission goals in one trip, but still, on many occasions you'll have no choice but to take a long trip for the 10th time. And while quite a few missions sport rather interesting objectives and have you discover new places or new stuff to do (like flying planes, which can only be done on missions), at least an equal amount of them feel general and have you doing boring stuff you have done several times before. On top of all, everything is basically without consequence. Kill Major x, Commandante y or Don z on a mission, when you visit town next time, he'll be back alive and kicking.

And while the visuals, albeit repetitive, are OKish, there's sound. Music, while apparently passable, will only be playing at all on rare occasions. Sound effects, on the other hand, are a nightmare. Especially running cars (in which you will spent a huge amount of your playing time) sound downright terrible. Listening to the radio, like in GTA, might have helped quite a bit here, but unfortunately, car radios are a thing unknown in the game's world. The utterings of the various characters you meet are uninspired and as repetitive as the artwork. I for myself have played most of the game with my volume set to 15% (I usually have them at least at 50% when playing a game), so I can barely hear when somebody shoots at me or I'm addressed in a conversation, but can usually ignore any sound, treating it like background static.

Next comes a topic which is present in a disturbing number of games released on PC these days: bugs. Boiling Point is bug ridden, literally. While many of the bugs are merely nuisances most of the time (like the disappearing vehicles bug), some are lethal. There are a few quest stoppers, you can fall through the ground when driving through the jungle - a clipping issue which has you fall into the void, with the bottom side of the landscape slowly disappearing above your head, sometimes the game will dump you to the desktop etc. On top, the performance of the engine is awkward. If you have ever played Diablo 2 (or any similar game) online, you know situations where suddenly the screen freezes, leaving you paralyzed a few seconds, and when you are back in sync, you find that the monster you had been battling has killed you in the meantime. Lag has struck. Boiling Point is probably the first offline game I have played that features lag. It's not rare that you drive around in your car, suddenly everything freezes, and when the screen moves again you find that you car performed a stunt you could never pull off while "actively playing", taking the lives of a few pedestrians that happened to stand in your path with you in the process.

The Bottom Line
Given a little more work, this might have become a real gem. Unfortunately, though, there are too many things that didn't come out in a favorable way, like the ever present repetitiveness, lack of atmosphere and persistence, the bugs and the lack of polish ... it's sad, but can't be ignored. Anyone who enjoys the likes of GTA and would like to play something similar with more focus on FPS shooting and set in a different scenery might want to give it a shot. People with a low tolerance on the things I mentioned above might want to pass, however.

The Good
An original concept that mixed two of the most popular genres in gaming. Lots of map to explore, people to meet and weapons to use. Good graphics.

The Bad
BUGS !!! that pretty much covers it, this game is almost unplayable and not even patch 2.0 could fix the endless amount of problems you'll find in this game.

Here are some of the most annoying things you'll encounter :

You can't hear the dialogs even when you drop the music and effects down... I mean what's the point of paying an actor (Arnold Vosloo the guy from "The Mummy") to play the part of the main character if you are not going to be able to hear what he is saying.

The effects are redundant and some like horns from cars that got stuck in traffic are going to drive you mad (I went and killed a driver cause the horn was driving me crazy while I was walking through town)

The cars handling is horrible and you fall through the ground on several trips or get stuck into walls or trees.

Did you ever saw a lightning storm that didn't had any rain? well in boiling point you will... weather effects are buggy as well.

The Bottom Line
I like it when developers try to blend different genres, and Boiling Point wanted to be an FPS/RPG with some driving added into the mix.

The idea of exploring a bogus 3rd world country named "Realia" that (according to the developers) was based on Colombia didn't appeal to me very much and was insulting at best to Colombian people ( FYI : I'm not from Colombia )

Stay away! this was a good idea turned into a nightmare you'll be less frustrated if you try to teach your dog how to read.